Drop-down list of forums in search

Hi, I hope I am not making a big feature request, but has anybody noticed that the drop-down list of forums (that appears when somebody clicks on the "search" link) is not ordered. It makes it very difficult to locate a forum like this. Can you make it alphabetical please? Thanks,

Originally posted by Debashish Chakrabarty: Hi, I hope I am not making a big feature request, but has anybody noticed that the drop-down list of forums (that appears when somebody clicks on the "search" link) is not ordered. It makes it very difficult to locate a forum like this. Can you make it alphabetical please? Thanks,

It is ordered. They are in the same order as they appear on the main forum page.

ooo I tend to differ Tom... I think its ordered by when each forum was created... at least that's my best guess -- here's the order that I see:

You are right, I was looking at the wrong dropdown. I never use that dropdown because I always go to the forum I want to search to do my search. There is nothing in the control panel that deals with this so it needs to be investigated by someone with more access than I have.

Originally posted by Donald R. Cossitt: Thanks Tom, that alphebetical thing really is a big difference

Thank Jim. He did all the work!

Jim Yingst
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posted May 19, 2003 16:42:00

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Well, it turns out this change creates more problems for us. When I recently tried to add a new forum, the UBB sofware became very badly confused. It turns out that the file which controls the order that the drop-down list is displayed in - is also used by other parts of the UBB software, and the order of these file entries is significant somehow, linked to a group's ID number, which... well... let's just say we can't change this stuff without rewriting a lot of other stuff, and it's much more complex than I want to deal with. So I've reverted the forum list back to its old format, and in order to use the search page, you've got to look through that icky unsorted list. Sorry guys - I tried...

Sometimes I forget which forum a certain topic is in. I answer questions on the beginner and intermediate forums quite often. Is it difficult to allow a search on more than one forum at the same time? This is a feature that I would find very useful.

Layne- we used to have a "search all forums" thing -- but we've got so many posts and so many users... that it kept crashing the server. So, the moral of the story is that there's no "multiple search" option -- however if you click on your profile, you can see your last 50 posts, maybe that will help?

Jim Yingst
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posted May 21, 2003 18:51:00

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Unfortunately, when you use the "all forums" option (if it were enabled), it basically does a single-forum search of forum 1, then of forum 2, then 3, etc. It's not in any way optimized to use an index of posts from all forums. So it's hideously inefficient. Even if we enabled it, you'd get a result much quicker by manually switching through searches of the those forums you actually spend time in. Of course, with "all forums" you'd have the option of starting a search and just coming back later to see the results. But the fact that you'd want to do this is an indication of how much work it puts the server through.

Hey Ranchers, Seems like we traveled full circle. The search drop-down is back to what it used to be..disorderly. Did all this discussion go to waste? Regards,

Jim Yingst
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posted Jun 03, 2003 08:50:00

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See my previous post beginning with "Well, it turns out this change creates more problems for us." I did sort the list, but it turns out this creates other bugs which are more serious than the original problem, so I changed the list back to its original unsorted state (which actually reflects order of creation, and thus forum number, which is used for a lot of other things). So I think this list will have to remain the way it is. Sorry.